About “Electric Relaxation”

The second single from Midnight Marauders finds the Tribe mixing the back-and-forth from “Check the Rhime” with the smoothness and similar subject matter of “Bonita Applebum.” Tip delivers his “street poetry” alongside Phife’s punchlines over a sample from Ronnie Foster’s “Mystic Brew.” In a 2013 interview with XXL, Phife briefly detailed the making of the track:

I came home from some type of trip and I walked in the kitchen, and you know, [Q-Tip]’s in the basement and you could hear the music coming up, and all I heard was that. I didn’t even say hello to my grandmother or whoever was in the house, I was just like, “Hold on!” and went downstairs. “Yo, what the hell is that?!” He was like, “Yo, that shit is crazy, right?” And it just became what it is now […] On that record, he wrote my lines and I wrote his—actually, we wrote our own lines, and when we recorded, we traded. That’s why the whole back and forth, you know what I mean?

This track peaked at number 2 on Billboard’s Hot Dance Music/Maxi-Singles chart and it was also used as the theme song for the first two seasons of The Wayans Bros. The song has been included on many lists of hip-hop’s greatest songs and it has been sampled or referenced by a number of artists such as Kanye West and BadBadNotGood among others.